Dear Mike

"It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV. Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson on the tragedy and it's implications...the link is at ESPN.com where he is a Page2 columnist: Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day. The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anythi...

Wow, I was really on fire at the start of the 2000s, to wit, look at this play-by-play of a grunge nightmare (and hilariously I was just recently trying to remember which of the big dumb grunge bands I had seen back in the day) which also references a broken friendship that I rarely remember (hahahahhahaha, Todd and Alyssa!): "I've said it before, and have no problem saying it again, people are stupid, and rockstars suck. You put the two together, in a small smokey club, plus have me lose $10 because i'm wearing a dress and have no pockets so I was carrying loose bills wadded up in my jacket pocket like some sort (ok, THE sort) of indie-pop-dork-girl i may be, and you have the makings for one very disgruntled music afficianado. Girl. Woman. Whatever. Here's the thing, right, I'm all good with rockstars like Oasis. I mean, those guys are clowns. Like David Lee Roth and other big ol' egos, at least they don't pretend to be nobodies and then whip out the att...

Dude. What even is this anymore? Just dove into my original online extraveganza, as I tend to do when I'm feeling morose (typical at this time of the year) and the last part of a post from late November hit hard: "Right. Post-WTO scene is pretty dismal. I'm not up to the debate any longer. I will go out on a limb though and say that the wonder and anger that people are feeling can only be good. People in this country are very complacent when it comes to their civil rights, they talk about them, but few ever put themselves in a position to have them denied. Which is exactly what happened. Yep, it can happen to YOU. In "your" city. No fun. So for that, I'm glad. For the unending whining about "healing" and that sort of new agey stuff, that I'm not so glad. The chief of police has stepped down, and one can only hope the mayor will follow suit. Having been elected by the downtown business core who he failed to "protect" surely will get hi...

Hey. I am trapped in my own head. Have been since before the internet. It's worse now than ever. Feelings of regret rooted in the overwhelming feeling that I have not achieved my potential. That I should be better. Done better. Made more of a difference. That I can be launched into a spiral by the simplest song playing on the radio station. That I literally have given up being out in the world - after seeming to have been in it for a long time, and yet, really, when you look at it, I wasn't out in it much at all. Given that the internet is the place where history will presumably live now, I will have barely existed in about 10 years. Even though I remember so much about weird little bits of cultural ephemera, I can't remember even half of the gigs I played (and probably only played a few hundred overall at most). And now? Now I'm just pissed off that I didn't spend more time thinking about what I really wanted to do, what I really cared about while I was in college...

Hey Mike. It feels like I say this in every dispatch, but it remains truer ever day: getting old is really tripping me out. I envy folks who can just take it in stride and not have daily extistential breakdowns. Feels like everyday I discover another thing about myself that informs the last 50 years which would be great except: I CAN'T MFing DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT NOW. As mentioned in the title here, Christine McVie died yesterday, at 79. When someone like that cashes out at 79 I feel like I'll be lucky to see 60 - because I did all the drugs and hard living, but have had none of the last 15 years to sort of recoup like she and Stevie could do in the 2000's. Argh. Anyway, when John played a set of Fleetwood Mac this morning, I heard a song (Songbird) from Rumors that I hadn't heard in decades...and it almost made me tear up. I definitely choked up. When I was 9, my parents (dad, most likely chose it as mom wasn't much of a "trendy tech" kinda gal) gave me ...

So, last week in unexpected news that hit way harder than I expeced (not sure really what I "expected" I guess I didn't expect to hear our old pal, our French guardian angel, our saving grace died last Sunday. Once again sending me into a deep, rough spiral that makes me just flat-out sad. Is that what getting old is really? Just getting progressibely sadder until you are like my mom, the only one left alive with no one to talk to about the things you used to love, the experiences that made you? I pulled the ol' tour diary off the shelf again and aside from being pissed that I wrote absolutely NOTHING down about our time with the Vicious Fishes, it hit me this time how many times I referred to thinking we were surely gonna die due to some sort of risky behavior or because we were trusting the help of people we did not know. Honestly, Marc really was the guy who epitomized for me the best part of being involved in punk rock - cause he, like so many of us, let a buch of...

This is a bit off topic for us Mike, but still I think you would appreciate it (what's weird is that I think Kjell might even get what I'm thinking - how weird is that?). So this global superstar that I have recently become a bit of an acolyte of - (and who I genuinely find fascinating on several anthropological levels) played his 5th night at whatever the major arena in Austin is (a town I could visit, I think and have people to stay with even!) and the night before he had made this very typical (for him) statement about "don't let anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your body" - which is of course a great sentiment, but kind of ineffectual when said in a state run by a redneck Trump-wannabe who recently shoved a bunch of anti-abortion laws through their statehouse. Anyway, I feared he was gonna be just another fucking joker who sits on the fence saying vaguely political things but never actually taking a stand with his music or personae, and then ...